"Ask God to help you in your hours of loneliness and they will not seem so long and dark," said Cecil, whose soul was one tumultuous self-reproach that he had let the time go by without telling her more of God.
"Ah!" she said in a strange, wistful way, "I have prayed to him so much, but he could not fill all my heart. I wanted so to touch a hand and look on a face like my mother s. But God has sent you, and so I know he must be good."
They parted, and he went back to the camp.
"Is my mission a failure? " he thought, as he walked along, clinching his hands in furious anger with himself. "Why do I let a girl s beauty move me thus, and she the promised wife of another? How dare I think of aught beside the work God has sent me here to do? Oh, the shame and guilt of such weakness! I will be faithful. I will never look upon her face again!"
He emerged from the wood into the camp; its multitudinous sounds were all around him, and never had the coarseness and savagery of Indian life seemed so repellent as now, when he came back to it with his mind full of Wallulah s grace and loveliness. It was harsh discord after music.
Stripped and painted barbarians were hallooing, feasting, dancing; the whole camp was alive with boisterous hilarity, the result of a day of good fellow ship. Mothers were calling their children in the dusk and young men were sportively answering, "Here I am, mother." Here and there, Indians who had been feasting all day lay like gorged anacondas beside the remnant of their meal; others, w
